jeudi 15 mai 2014

We've
all but given up on the War on Drugs and embraced pot brownies and
fourth graders reselling their grandparents' legal stash on the
playground. The War on Terror has been scaled down to a few drones
occasionally taking out a gang of Jihadis in Pakistan or Yemen.

Even
the original kind of non-metaphorical war has been slashed to the bone
with the military barely having enough metal left to scare off a flock
of crows.

But the War on Racism has never ended. And it will never end.

The
left has claimed that the War on Terror and the War on Drugs and even
every real war were pretexts by the military-industrial complex, the
prison industry, the policing industry and all the other industries to
seize power by manufacturing a crisis.

But they are the ones who maintain a state of racial emergency long after the crisis has passed.

According
to them, terrorism and crime are imaginary crises. Racism is the real
threat.

We have been fighting the War on Racism for over a century and
even though the United States is less racist and more tolerant than most
of the world, including Latin America, Asia and Africa, they are
determined to keep the war going.

The Sterling case is only the
latest production of racial outrage theater in which a minor incident
that usually involves someone privately or semi-privately expressing a
politically incorrect opinion that most people disagree with, but that
they have the right to express, is blown up into a crisis worthy of a
serial killer’s rampage with non-stop media coverage, political pressure
and a ritual beheading.

These cases are not about punishing the
powerful. Donald Sterling might be a wealthy and powerful man, but
Justine Sacco wasn't. The purges are opportunistic. Sterling dodged a
racial bullet for years until his private conversation was taped and
publicized. The next Sterling or Sacco might be anyone.

And that's the larger message. It's not about tolerance; it's about a wave of political terror.

The
War on Racism has deprived Americans of more civil rights than any
military conflict, including the Civil War, WW1, WW2, the Cold War and
the War on Terror. Whatever crisis in race relations once existed has
gone away. Slavery was abolished. Segregation was outlawed.
Discrimination is easy to litigate. Every company and branch of
government has employees dedicated to investigating claims of racial
intolerance and even rewarding other employees based on their skin
color.

Individuals will go on being only human and privately
holding racist views, but it's not the job of government to relentlessly
purge thoughtcrimes. At least it’s not the job of our government.

A
privatized Oceania with a crowdsourced Ministry of Truth pursuing
violators across social media is in its own way every bit as putrid.
Denunciations and purges polarize a society, destroy dissent and
invariably lead to tyranny because witch hunters have a vested interest
in manufacturing witches.

A nation run by witch hunters will
always keep finding more old women to burn at the stake and a society
dominated by social justice warriors will always find ways to aggravate
racial tensions.

Like the good people of Salem, we have allowed
bitter and unhinged demagogues to bully us into empowering them. Our
good intentions, our aspirations for a tolerant and post-racial society,
have been exploited to drag us into an endless war that we do not want
or need

In the name of good, we have empowered evil. And we
cannot accomplish good ends through evil means. We cannot end racial
hatred through more racial hatred. We cannot fight racial discrimination
through more racial discrimination. We can't protect civil rights by
violating civil rights.

And we cannot learn to love each other by spreading hate.

A
paranoid society perpetually at war with itself has no future.

Healthy
societies debate issues. They don't destroy people who disagree with
them. And they don't reward demagogues who spend all their time calling
for the heads of their enemies on social media and MSNBC.

This isn't about racism. It's about the kind of society we want.

Do
we want a liberal society, in the original sense, that is tolerant
because it allows for a range of views, or do we want a fascist society
that claims to be both liberal and tolerant while maintaining the
atmosphere of France's Reign of Terror and Salem's witch trials?

The
War on Racism has had its good days, but those days are long gone.
Instead the War on Racism generates most of the racism around us.

The
stories about racism that crowd into our eyes and ears are manufactured
outrages aimed at individuals. These are not stories about the problems
that black people face, but a political civil war between mostly white
elites who use the suffering of black people as weapons.

The
racial grievance industry perpetuates racism for the sake of power. It
manufactures racism, distributes racism and then demands racial remedies
for the problems that it creates. Racism has become a false flag
operation that is being kept going by the race warriors who claim to be
fighting it tooth and nail.

The mandate of the grievance industry
isn't healing, it's outrage. It is open about seeking a perpetual state
of racial conflict.

Operating under radical left wing views that
would have disgusted the civil rights leaders of the past, they insist
that racism is a collective racial crime, that white people are racist
by birth, that black people are incapable of racism and that a racist
society cannot be healed, only destroyed.

If they can't find
actual racism, they seek out "micro-aggressions" expanding the scope of
things that they take offense at to perpetuate their state of political
privilege.

All this amounts to a justification for perpetual war and unlimited power.

Do
we need an endless War on Racism that violates our civil rights and
promotes the very thing that it claims to be fighting against? Is racism
today such a grave threat that we should accept the endless
militarization of our society to fight against it?

The Supreme
Court over the decades has stepped down the legal basis for the War on
Racism concluding that race is no longer a major crisis that justifies
the violation of civil rights. But the race warriors ignore the progress
that has been made and demand even more extreme measures that were not
even contemplated when fighting against actual segregation.

Having
been thwarted at the legal level, they are launching social attacks or
ignoring the law. Under Holder, the Department of Justice has begun
making and enforcing its own laws without regard to the judiciary and to
the cheers of the race warriors. This state of authoritarian
lawlessness has fascist overtones and it's a warning sign of worse
things to come.

Instead of escalating the War on Racism, it's time to end it.

The
War on Racism has gone on too long. So long that like all wars it has
become self-perpetuating. The strategies of the War on Racism do not
serve reconciliation or healing. They do not teach us to live with one
another. Like all wars, they teach only conflict.

Obama's
election was supposed to promote racial healing. Instead he and his
cronies chose to use it to further racial divides for their own power.
And that is the final lesson of the War on Racism.

A post-racial
society can never emerge under the leadership of men and women whose
power comes from the exploitation of racism. If we are going to move
beyond racism, it will not be through rewarding those who profit from
racial conflict.

Once we step out of their shadow, we can begin
tackling the problems of black communities instead of using them as
weapons against each other. We can deal with black unemployment and the
black family. We can deal with the real problems that are keeping people
down.

Peace in the War on Racism begins with letting go of
anger. It ends when we stop giving power to those who divide us with
their pursuit of racial warfare in the name of grievance, outrage,
anger, power and profit. Racism will only end when the War on Racism
does.

Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and
blogger and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom
Center.